One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. The late Reinhold Niebuhr, who died in
1971, wrote this previously unpublished article in 1967, 15 years after his
retirement as professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary
in New York City. This article appeared in the Christian CenturyDecember 19-26, 1984, p 1195. Copyright by
the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and
subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for
Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

It may be hazardous to give an account
of my experiences, and my changed perspectives and views, following a stroke
that lamed my left side in 1952, in the 60th year of my life. Perhaps the
simile “from the sidelines” is inadequate to describe the contrast between my
rather too-hectic activities as a member of the Union Theological Seminary
faculty; as weekly circuit rider preaching every Sunday in the colleges of
the east; and as a rather polemical journalist who undertook to convert
liberal Protestantism from its perfectionist illusions in the interventionist
political debates at a time when Hitler threatened the whole of Western
culture -- and the inactivity and helplessness I experienced after my stroke.
The physical trauma prompted at least three depressions, which my neurologist
regarded as normal. He was not, however, averse to my seeking advice from
friendly psychiatrists. I learned from them, particularly those who combined
clinical experience with wisdom and compassion, that the chief problem was to
reconcile myself to this new weakness; I had to live through these
depressions. Then, as various ancillary ailments increased, my working day
grew shorter and shorter but my depressions ceased -- because, I imagine, I
had adjusted myself to my increasing weakness. Also, daily therapy prevented
spastic limbs from growing worse, and this gave me hope. In 1952,
neurologists were not particularly interested in rehabilitation; I had to
wait about ten years for these therapies. Then my old friend the late Waldo
Frank told me about his daughter, Deborah Caplan. who had been trained by the
famous Howard Rusk. She not only gave me weekly treatments but trained a
number of young nurses, some of whom happened to be the wives of my students,
to give me daily therapy. I owe to them a tremendous debt, as I do also to
our old friend, Hannah Burrington of Heath, Massachusetts, who stayed with my
wife and me every summer and gave me twice-daily treatments.

My first stroke, which was not too severe, was
caused by a cerebral vascular thrombosis. Some of my doctors attributed it to
nervous exhaustion, while others said it was caused by defective “plumbing” and
might have occurred in the life of a janitor. I lost my speech for two days,
and the following two years were rough. I was given sick leave from the seminary,
but eventually resumed my academic work until my retirement in 1960. With the
help of my wife, I was able to accept visiting professorships at Harvard,
Princeton and Columbia. My frustration at the relative inactivity was overcome
somewhat in that I could continue writing articles and editorials. I used an
electric typewriter but found it impossible to use a dictaphone. The habits of
a lifetime ordained that I must see what I write, line by line.

In short, my dismissal from the “playing fields”
to the “sidelines” was accomplished gradually; but now, in the 75th year of my
life, suffering from various ills and weaknesses, I am conscious of the
contrast between an active and a semidependent status. These 15 years represent
almost a quarter of the years of my ministry.

I must confess my ironic embarrassment as I
lived through my depressions, which had the uniform characteristic of an
anxious preoccupation with real or imagined future perils. The embarrassment,
particularly, was occasioned by the incessant correspondence about a prayer I
had composed years before, which the old Federal Council of Churches had used
and which later was printed on small cards to give to soldiers. Subsequently
Alcoholics Anonymous adopted it as its official prayer. The prayer reads: ‘‘God,
give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to
distinguish the one from the other.”

Many friendly and inquiring correspondents asked
for the original inspiration of the prayer, whether I was really its author, or
whether it had been Francis of Assisi, or even an admiral who had used it in a
shipboard worship service. I received about two such letters a week, and every
answer to an inquiring correspondent embarrassed me because I knew that my
present state of anxiety defied the petition of this prayer. I confessed my
embarrassment to our family physician, who had a sense of humor touched with
gentle cynicism. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Doctors and preachers are not
expected to practice what they preach.” I had to be content with this minimal
consolation.

Now I must come to a discussion of the
view of life from the sidelines as compared with the view of life that active
participation encourages. This cannot be adequately presented without a
discriminate analysis of two connotations of the word “sidelines.” Sidelines
are on the one hand filled with athletes who have been injured in the battles
of the arena, and on the other hand with spectators. My view of life since my
stroke had to be informed by both connotations. I was dismissed from the
battle, but I was also a spectator to engagements that had hitherto occupied
me. Emancipation from the endless discussions of committee meetings, trying
to solve problems in both religious and political communities that had
hitherto occupied so much of my time, was a desirable freedom from the chores
of a democratic society; but it also meant an emancipation from
responsibility -- a doubtful boon, because responsibility engages us in the
causes of moral, political and religious movements.

I still remain uncertain whether the relaxation
of the polemical attitudes of my youthful zest for various causes represents
the wisdom of old age, the disengagement of a spectator, or an increasing
awareness of the strange mixture of good and evil in all the causes and
purposes that once had prompted me to carry the banners of religion against
secularism, and of Protestantism against Catholicism. I now hope that the
unpolemical attitudes of my old age and dependence may have had their roots in
experience, rather than in the irresponsibility of weakness and lack of
engagement. My early polemical attitude toward the Catholic Church had been
modified when, in the days of the New Deal social revolution, the Catholic
Church revealed that it was much more aware of the social substance of human
nature, and of the discriminate standards of justice needed in the collective
relations of a technical culture, than was our individualistic Protestantism.
But my view from the sidelines of illness made me more fully aware of the
impressive history of the Catholic faith, and of its sources of grace and
justice, which even our Reformation polemics cannot obscure.

There is some advantage in the spectator’s view
as opposed to the advocate’s. One can see all the strange forms of spirit and
culture that a common faith may take, without disloyalty to one’s inherited
beliefs. It can be exciting when one ceases to be a consistent advocate and
polemical agent of a belief system. If I feel, at times, that an attitude from
the sidelines may betray the irresponsibility of a pure spectator, I console
myself with the fact that my current loyalty to causes, while less copious, is
also more selective. And on the two main collective moral issues of our day --
the civil rights movement that seeks democratic improvements for our black
minority, and opposition to the terrible and mistaken war in Vietnam -- the
thoroughly ecumenical cooperation among the three biblical faiths gives one a
reassuring confidence that unpolemical attitudes are not in contrast to moral
commitments. My semiretirement has brought me nearer to the common moral
commitments of the three faiths.

The physical ills that consigned me to the
“sidelines” were productive in furnishing me with insights about human nature
that had never occurred to me before. I learned to know the goodness of men and
women who went out of their way to help an invalid. Among the persons who
impressed me with their helpfulness were my doctors, nurses and therapists, my
colleagues and friends in the realms of both politics and religion. I soon
learned that some of these people who entered my life professionally, or who
served me nonprofessionally with visits and walks, showed an almost charismatic
gift of love. And, of course, my chief source of spiritual strength was my
wife. She was my nurse, secretary, editor, counselor and friendly critic
through all those years of illness and occasional depression. We had been
happily married for two decades, but I had never measured the depth and breadth
of her devotion until I was stricken. It may be an indication of my male pride
that I had only casually relied on her superior sense of style in editing my
books and articles. Now I absolutely relied on her editing, and it dealt not
only with style but, more and more, with the substance of my thought.

Again and again she assured me that I would do
as much for her, were she ill. But I doubted it, because I was inclined to
affirm the superior agape of woman.

The retrospective view that my illness made
inevitable was not reassuring for my ego. I found it embarrassing that my moral
teachings, which emphasized the mixture of self-regard and creativity in all
human motives, had not been rigorously applied to my own motives. I do not
pretend that this new insight made for saintliness. My experience is that
constant illness tends to induce preoccupation with one’s ills; the tyranny of
invalids is a well-known phenomenon.

The mixture of motives in all people, incidentally,
refutes the doctrines both of total depravity and of saintliness. In my case,
retrospection from the sidelines prompted me to remember many instances in my
earlier years when my wife had protested my making an extra trip or going to
yet another conference, despite my weariness; I always pleaded the importance
of the cause that engaged me, and it never occurred to me that I might have
been so assiduous in these engagements because the invitations flattered my
vanity.

I now proceed to two more objective insights
from the “sidelines.” The one concerns my view of the church as a hearer,
rather than a preacher, of sermons. I had only one parish, in Detroit, where
I served as pastor after my graduation from the Yale Divinity School in 1915
until my appointment to the faculty of Union Seminary in 1928. But in
subsequent years I was, as I said, a preacher in the universities and, of
course, in our seminary chapel. The life of the local church was therefore terra
incognita to me. After my illness I worshiped in many local churches,
particularly in the summer months.

I had always believed that the vitality of
religion after the rise of modern science, which tended to discredit the
legends of religious history, was due to the simple fact that faith in an
incomprehensible divine source of order was an indispensable bearer of the
human trust in life, despite the evils of nature and the incongruities of
history. An aura of mystery surrounded every realm of historical meaning. But
as I became a pew-worshiper rather than the preacher, I had some doubts about
the ability of us preachers to explicate and symbolize this majesty and
mystery. These pulpit-centered churches of ours, without a prominent altar,
seemed insufficient. Moreover, in the nonliturgical churches the ‘‘opening
exercises” -- with a long pastoral prayer which the congregation could not
anticipate or join in -- seemed inadequate. I came to view the Catholic mass
as, in many religious respects, more adequate than our Protestant worship. For
the first time I ceased to look at Catholicism as a remnant of medieval
culture. I realized that I envied the popular Catholic mass because that
liturgy, for many, expressed the mystery which makes sense out of life always
threatened by meaninglessness.

The second insight about religious faith that I
gained from the years of partial invalidism has to do with the problem of
mortality and our seeming disinclination to accept the fact. All human beings
face death as an inevitable destiny, but those of us who are crippled by heart disease
or cerebral injury or other illness are more conscious of this destiny,
particularly as we advance in years. The fear of death was a frequent topic of
conversation with my closest friend. We were both in a situation in which death
might be imminent. We both agreed that we did not fear death -- though I must
confess that we did not consider the unconscious, rather than the conscious,
fear that might express itself. We believed in both the immortality and the
mortality of the person, and acknowledged that the mystery of human selfhood
was quite similar to the mystery of the divine. In the Hebraic-Christian faith,
God both transcends, and is involved in, the flux of time and history. The
human personality has the same transcendence and involvement, but of course the
transcendence of mortals over the flux of time is not absolute. We die, as do
all creatures. But it is precisely our anxious foreboding of our death that
gives us a clue to the dimension of our deathlessness.

The belief in a life after death, held by both
primitive and high religions, reveals the human impulse to speculate about our
deathlessness, despite the indisputable proofs of our mortality. In the Greek
and Hebrew faiths, which converge in the Christian faith, we have a significant
contrast of the symbols of this faith. The Hebrews, and of course our New
Testament, are confident of the “resurrection of the body,” thus emphasizing
the integral unity of the person in body and soul.

This symbolic expression of faith is currently
almost neglected, despite the biblical references to it in the liturgy of
funeral services. We moderns seem to believe that the notion of a disembodied
immortal soul is more credible than the idea of resurrection. In fact, we have
no empirical experience either of a resurrected body or of a disembodied soul.
This confusion of symbols in the religious observance at the time of death,
incidentally observed even by families of little religious faith, may indicate
that belief in the deathlessness of mortal humans is not taken too seriously in
strict dogmatic terms. But it does reveal the faith that most of us have, a
presupposition of the residual immortality of our mortal friends. We express it
simply in the phrase, “I can’t believe he’s dead.” There are, of course, many forms
of social immortality. Political heroes are immortal in the memory of their
nations; the great figures in the arts and sciences, or of any discipline of
culture, have social immortality in their respective disciplines; we common
mortals are, at least, remembered by our dear ones. But there is a dimension of
human personality that is not acknowledged in these forms of social
immortality.

The very contrast between the two symbols of
resurrection and immortality in our Western Christian tradition calls attention
to this ambiguity in the dimension of deathlessness in our mortal frame. I am
personally content to leave this problem of deathlessness in the frame of
mystery, and to console myself with the fact that the mystery of human selfhood
is only a degree beneath the mystery of God.

This symbolic expression of faith is currently
almost neglected. If we recognize that the human self is not to be equated with
its mind, though the logical and analytic faculties of the mind are an
instrument of its freedom over nature and history, and if we know that the self
is intimately related to its body but cannot be equated with its physical
functions, we then are confronted with the final mystery of its capacity of
transcendence over nature, history and even its own self; and we will rightly
identify the mystery of selfhood with the mystery of its indeterminate freedom.

This freedom is its guarantee of the self s
relations with the dimension of the “Eternal.” While mortal, it has the
capacity to relate itself to the ‘‘things that abide.” St. Paul enumerates
these abiding things as “faith, hope and love.” Faith is the capacity to
transcend all the changes of history and to project an ultimate source and end
of temporal and historical reality. Hope is the capacity to transcend all the
confusions of history and project an ultimate end of all historical existence,
that which does not annul history but fulfills it. Love is the capacity to recognize
the social substance of human existence, and to realize that the unique self is
intimately related to all human creatures. These capacities relate the self to
the eternal world and are its keys to that world.

In an Hebraic-biblical faith, neither history
nor human selfhood is regarded as an illness of the flux of the temporal world
from which we must escape. Each is regarded as a creation of the divine which
is fulfilled, and not annulled by the source and end of history which is
rightly revered as divine. Thus the individual, though mortal, is given, by
self-transcendent freedom, the key to immortality. Individual selfhood is not a
disaster or an evil. It is subsumed in the counsels of God and enters the
mystery of immortality by personal relation to the divine. I could not, in all
honesty, claim more for myself and my dear ones, as I face the ultimacy of
death in the dimension of history, which is grounded in nature.